Just as the title states, I and many other people would love to see this game appear on Greenlight.

However this has been brought up on occasion but never really managed to take flight (due to licensing difficulties).So I decided to dig into this a bit further to see what those difficulties would actually mean, and after some digging it seems that they aren't untenable.Quoting from the GPL 2 license it states that:

You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.

And when quoting from Steam Greenlight

Do not post..... Someone else's game or software, unless you have specific authorization to do so.

With these in mind I started searching on steam if I could find any other GPL licensed software, of which there are plenty e.g. Blender and Warsow and Aquaria and Gish are all available through Steam.

Next, I saw that Green Light requires a one time down payment of $100, which is very acceptable (and I would be more than willing to pay this myself).

After all having gone through that I decided to hit up one of the owners (http://forums.wz2100.net/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=1436) of the Warzone Steam Group and go over this together. Upon which the conclusion was formed that before I would just toss it on Green Light that I should test the waters on the forums.

While the idea of being on Steam is fine, there are still big reasons why we haven't done it before, and will not be on Steam for awhile.

For starters, the Warzone 2100 project only has 1, maybe 2, sometimes 3 people working on it on their free time (which means you can see nothing from people for a long time.), though, we do have some contributors pop in from time to time.

What does that have to do with anything? Well, being such a small group of people, means that we are hard pressed to really support something on Steam.It isn't as simple as sticking things up and leave it, since you got to update it, have a way to compile with the cross-compiler all the Steam specific stuff (no idea what is required, or even if it is available for win32), and then you got new forums and all that stuff.

No small task.

However, the bigger issue is the game is just not ready to be on Steam.The 3.2.x series is far from being as stable as 3.1.5 was, and that has a boat load of issues as well. (See trac).This means that a release on Steam would generate lots of new users, all reporting about issues in 3.2.x, and it would turn into an avalanche of issues pretty darn quickly that would overwhelm us, even more so than we already are.

The vast majority of the people ONLY play single player games, and in this regard, 3.2.2 is basically beta at best, with constant crashes and/or issues that break the campaign that just were not present in 3.1.5. The 3.1 series is deprecated, and we are on the 3.2 series.

That said, the multiplayer side of things is, most people are still playing 3.1.5 since 3.2.2 has too many issues to play a reliable game with for a variety of issues outlined in trac, and talked about on the IRC channel #warzone2100-games.

So, bottom line is, no, please don't do anything with Steam now, the game isn't ready for it.Once it becomes more stable, we will gladly look into this again when we reach that point.

performance wise.. the are delays when loading levels, but I blame the Universal Windows Platform. because the game loads fine outside of it..

only reason I found this thread is that I was thinking about publishing it through steam. while I do have free time,I work a paying job 3 days a week, I dont have an extra $100 laying around.

of course if people willing to do donations can head to newnoldsoftware.com and go to the paypal link on the side.

but Im not begging here. just saying...I could do it.

not the begging part....

Don't have time to look at it on there, but, you need to publish the source changes and all that good stuff someplace, to stay out of trouble.Also, what exactly is Version number: 1.0.1.0 ?DirectX Version 9 ?

/me is confused as to what exactly you did here.

Also, charging 99 cents for it? Why would people buy it, if they can get it for free here?

I think even a horrible version of this game on Steam is better than none.It would do no harm, but potentially a lot of good.

vexed wrote:[...] such a small group of people, means that we are hard pressed to really support something on Steam.It isn't as simple as sticking things up and leave it, since you got to update it, have a way to compile with the cross-compiler all the Steam specific stuff (no idea what is required, or even if it is available for win32), and then you got new forums and all that stuff.

A developer shortage already endangers supporting different hard- and software, as the recent problems with Mac builds demonstrate. Steam users will unlikely get worse support than currently active players, who have not seen major issues with the game addressed in years (e.g. online lags, the port forwarding requirement for online games, or frequent crashes).

vexed wrote:However, the bigger issue is the game is just not ready to be on Steam.The 3.2.x series is far from being as stable as 3.1.5 was, and that has a boat load of issues as well. (See trac).This means that a release on Steam would generate lots of new users, all reporting about issues in 3.2.x, and it would turn into an avalanche of issues pretty darn quickly that would overwhelm us, even more so than we already are.

More players online are desirable, and some of them might contribute to development. Even if most people who discovered a Steam version of this game gave up playing after a short time due to bugs, this would be no loss for the community.

Bugs exist regardless of whether people complain about them. Currently there are already many more than developers can fix in the forseeable future. What do we have to lose?

vexed wrote:[...] most people are still playing 3.1.5 since 3.2.2 has too many issues to play a reliable game with for a variety of issues outlined in trac, and talked about on the IRC channel #warzone2100-games.

So, bottom line is, no, please don't do anything with Steam now, the game isn't ready for it.Once it becomes more stable, we will gladly look into this again when we reach that point.

Given the current pace of development, it will take years until the game is somewhat stable -- if that is even a goal. In the absense of systematic unit tests, the number of bugs seems to have grown over time.

We might even stop pretending this game will be stable and switch from fixed to rolling releases. They would unite the online community instead of splitting it by version number and through increased exchange between players and developers improve the state of bugs and new features alike.

vexed wrote:Sorry, in a time crunch here & I'll keep this short, but, I still feel this game, as it currently is, is too broken to be on Steam.

Maybe when all the campaign issues have been resolved, we can start to think of adding it on there.

I am currently proposing the management of a balance overhaul side by side with cyborg, beth, 007 etc. And wanted to point out that once the major elements are finalized I have a few groups on steam I could pull to test down the road. It might be advantageous to release an open beta later on to collect feedback to hone the overall balance between all weapon and defensive systems once the rough edges have been hewn from the metal, as it were.

I know that despite being here almost a year that still makes me the FNG on deck, but i thought I would throw in my opinion

I think a steam release would be a good thing in the long run however steam customers demand a certain immediacy when issues arise, so given this projects history of updates I feel that would it be a bad idea for it to go up on steam at this point in time.

Basically I agree with Vexed on this, lets wait till at least the campaign is more stable before even attempting to get the game on steam, we will need to also some how raise the 100 or so dollars it will take to get the game put up.

We may even have to track down a proper scan of the manual eventually too, or create one ourselves.